Before you start reading, I want to say that I am not an analytics expert per se, but a strategic SEO and digital marketing consultant. On the other hand, in my daily work of auditing and designing holistic digital marketing strategies, I deal a lot with Analytics in order to understand my clients’ gaps and opportunities.

For that reason, what you are going to read isn’t an “ultimate guide,” but instead my personal and practical guide to content and its metrics, filled with links to useful resources that helped me solving the big contents’ metric mystery. I happily expect to see your ideas in the comments.

The difference between content and formats

One of the hardest things to measure is content effectiveness, mostly because there exists great confusion about its changing nature and purpose. One common problem is thinking of “content” and “formats” as synonyms, which leads to frustration and, with the wrong scaling processes present, may also lead to Google disasters.

What is the difference between content and formats?

Content is any message a brand/person delivers to an audience;

Formats are the specific ways a brand/person can deliver that message (e.g. data visualizations, written content, images/photos, video, etc.).

Just to be clear: We engage and eventually share the ideas and emotions that content represents, not its formats. Formats are just the clothing we choose for our content, and keeping the fashion metaphor, some ways of dressing are better than others for making a message more explicit.

Strategy, as in everything in marketing, also plays a very important role when it comes to content.

It is during the strategic phase that we attempt to understand (both thanks to our own site analysis and competitive analysis of others’ sites) if our content is responding to our audience’s interests and needs, and also to understand what metrics we must choose in order to assess its success or failure.

Paraphrasing an old Pirelli commercial tagline: Content without strategy is nothing.

Strategy: Starting with why/how/what

When we are building a content strategy, we should ask ourselves (and our clients and CMOs) these classic questions:

Why does the brand exist?

How does the brand solidify its “why?”

What specific tactics will the brand use for successfully developing the “how?”

Only when we have those answers can we understand the goals of our content, what metrics to consider, and how to calculate them.

Let use an example every Mozzer can understand.

Why does Moz exist?

The answer is in its tagline:

Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz’s software makes it easy.

How does Moz solidify its “why?”

Moz produces a series of tools, which help marketers in auditing, monitoring and taking insightful decisions about their web marketing projects.

Moreover, Moz creates and publishes content, which aims to educate marketers to do their jobs better.

If you notice, we can already pick out a couple of generic goals here:

Leads > subscriptions;

Awareness (that may ultimately drive leads).

What specific tactics does Moz use for successfully achieving its main goals?

Considering the nature of the two main goals we clarified above, we can find content tactics covering all the areas of the so-called content matrix.

Some classic content matrix models are the ones developed by Distilled (in the image above) and Smart Insights and First 10, but it is a good idea to develop your own based on the insights you may have about your specific industry niche.

The things Moz does are many, so I am presenting an incomplete list here.

In the “Purchase” side and with conversion and persuasion as end goals:

Home page and “Products” section of Moz.com (we can define them as “organic landing pages”);

Content about tools

Free tools;

Pro tools (which are substantially free for a 30-day trial period).

CPC landing pages;

Price page with testimonials;

“About” section;

Events sponsorship.

In the “Awareness” side and with educational and entertainment (or pure engagement) purposes:

The blogs (both the main blog and UGC);

The “Learn and Connect” section, which includes the Q&A;

Guides;

Games (The SEO Expert Quiz can surely be considered a game);

Webinars;

Social media publishing;

Email marketing

Live events (MozCon and LocalUp, but also the events where Moz Staff is present with one or more speakers).

Once we have the content inventory of our web site, we can relatively easily identify the specific goals for the different pieces of content, and of the single type of content we own and will create.

I will usually not consider content like tools, sponsorship, or live events, because even though content surely plays a role in their goals’ achievement, there are also other factors like user satisfaction and serendipity involved which are not directly related to content itself or cannot be easily measured.

Measuring landing/conversion pages’ content

This may be the easier kind of content to measure, because it is deeply related to the more general measures of leads and conversions, and it is also strongly related to everything CRO.

We can measure the effectiveness of our landing/conversion pages’ content easily with Google Analytics, especially if we remember to implement content grouping (here’s the official Google guide) and follow the suggestions Jeff Sauer offered in this post on Moz.

On the other hand, we should always remember that the default conversion rate metric should not be taken as the only metric to incorporate into decision-making; the same is true when it comes to content performance and optimization. In fact, as Dan Barker said once, the better we segment our analysis the better we can understand the performance of our money pages, give a better meaning to the conversion rate value and, therefore, correct and improve our sales and leads.

Good examples of segmentation are:

Conversions per returning visitor vs new visitor;

Conversions per type of visitor based on demographic data;

Conversions per channel/device.

These segmented metrics are fundamental for developing A/B tests with our content.

Here are some examples of A/B tests for landing/conversion pages’ content:

Title tags and meta description A/B tests (yes, title tags and meta descriptions are content too, and they have a fundamental role in CTR and “first impressions”);

Prominent presence of testimonials vs. a more discreet one;

Tone of voice used in the product description (copywriting experiment);

Product slideshow vs. video.

Here are a few additional sources about CRO and content, surely better than me for inspiring you in this specific field:

Measuring on-site “editorial” content

Here is where things start getting a little more complicated.

Blog posts, guides, white papers, and similar content usually do not have a conversion/lead nature, at leastnot directly. Usually their goals are more intangible ones, such as creating awareness, likability, trust, and authority.

In other cases, then, this kind of content also serves the objective of creating and maintaining an active community, as it does in the case of Moz. I tend to consider this a subset, though, because in many niches creating a community is not a top priority. Or, even if it is, it does not offer a reliable flux of “signals” so as to appropriately measure the effectiveness of our content because of pure lack of statistical evidence.

A good starting place is measuring the so-called consumption metrics.

Again, the ideal is to implement content grouping in Google Analytics (see the video above), because that way we can segment every different kind of editorial content.

For instance, if we have a blog, not only we can create a group for it, but we can also create

This are just three examples; think about your own measuring needs and the nature of your content, and you will come out with other ideas for content groupings.

The following are basic metrics that you’ll need to consider when measuring your editorial content:

Pageviews / Unique Pageviews

Pages / Session

Time on Page

The ideal is to analyze these metrics at least with these secondary levels:

Medium / Sources, so you can understand what channel contributed the most to your content visibility. Remember, though, that dark search/social is a reality that can screw up your metrics (check out Marshall Simmonds’ deck from MozCon 2015);

User Type, so to see what percent of the Pageviews is due to returning visitors (a good indicator of the level of trust and authority our content has) and new ones (which indicates the ability our content has to attract new potentially long-lasting readers);

Mobile, which is useful in understanding the environments in which our users mostly interact with our content, and how we have to optimize its experience depending on the device used, hence helping making our content more memorable.

You surely can have fun also analyzing your content’s performance by segmenting them per demographic indicators. For instance, it may be interesting to see what affinity categories of your readers there are, depending on the categorization used in your blog and that you have replicated in your content grouping. This, in fact, can help us in better understanding the personas composing our audience, and so refining the targeting of our content.

As you can see, I did not mention bounce rate as a metric to consider, and there is a reason for that: Bounce rate is tricky, and its misinterpretation can lead to bad decisions.

Instead of bounce rate, when it comes to editorial content (and blog posts in particular), I prefer to consider scroll completion, a metric we can retrieve using Tag Manager (see this post by Optimize Smart).

Finally, especially if you also grouped content for outstanding format used (video, embedded SlideShare, etc.), you will need to retrieve users’ interactions through Tag Manager. However, if you really want to dig into the analysis of how that content is consumed by users, you will need to export your Analytics data and then combine it with data from external sources, like YouTube Analytics, SlideShare Analytics, etc.

The more we share, the more we have. This is also true in Marketing.

Consumption metrics, though, are not enough in order to understand the performance of your content, especially if you strongly rely on a community and one of the content objectives is creating and growing a community around your brand.

I usually add comments into these Metrics, because of the social nature comments have. Again, thanks to Tag Manager, you can easily tag when someone clicks on the “add comment” button.

A final metric we should always consider is the page value. As Google itself explains in that Help Page:

Page value is a measure of influence. It’s a single number that can help you better understand which pages on your site drive conversions and revenue. Pages with a high Page Value are more influential than pages with a low Page Value [Page Value is also shown for groups of content].

The combined analysis of consumption and social metrics can offer us a very granular understanding of how our content is performing, therefore how to optimize our strategy and/or how to start conducting A/B tests.

On the other hand, such a granular vision is not the ideal for reporting, especially if we have to report to a board of directors and not to our in-house or in-agency counterpart.

In that case being able to resume all these metrics (or the most relevant ones) in just one metric is very useful.

How to do it? My suggestion is to follow (and adapt to your own needs) the methodology used by the Moz editorial team and described in this post by Trevor Klein.

What about the ROI of editorial content? Don’t give up; I’ll talk about it below.

Measuring the ROI of content marketing and content-based link building campaigns

Theoretically measuring the ROI of something is relatively easy:

(Return – Investment) / Investment = ROI.

However the difficulty is not in that formula itself, but in the values used in that formula.

How to calculate the investment value?

Usually we have a given budget assigned for our content marketing and/or content-based campaigns. If that is the case, perfect! We have a figure to use for the investment value.

A complete different situation is when we must present a budget proposal and/or assign part of the budget to each campaign in a balanced and considered way.

In this post by Caroline Gilbert for Siege Media you can find great suggestions about how to calculate a content marketing budget, but I would like to present mine, too, which is based on competitive analysis.

Here’s what I do:

Identify the distinct competitors which created content related to what we will target with our campaign. I rely on both SERP analysis (i.e.: using the Keyword Difficulty Tool by Moz) and information we can retrieve with a “keyword search” on Buzzsumo.

Social shares per kind of social network (these are available from BuzzSumo). Remember that some of these social shares can be tallied by sponsored content (check this Social Media Explorer post about how to do Facebook competitive analysis).

Consider the delta between what the client/company invested in content marketing (or link building, if it is moving from classic old link building to modern link earning) before, as well as the median investment value of the competitors.

Calculate and propose the content marketing / content-based campaign’s value in a range which goes from “minimum viable budget” to “ideal.”

Reality teaches us that the proposed investment is not the same than the real investment, but at least we then have some data for proposing it and not just a gut feeling. However, we must be prepared to work with budgets that are more on the “minimum viable” side than on the ideal one.

How to calculate revenue?

You can find a good number of ROI calculators, but I particularly like the Fractl one, because it is very easy to understand and use.

Their general philosophy is to calculate ROI in terms of how much traffic, links, and social shares the content itself has generated organically, hence how much it helped saving in paid promotion.

If you look at it, it reminds the methodology I described above (points 1 to 7).

However, when it comes to social shares, you should avoid the classic mistake of considering only the social shares directly generated by the page your content has been published.

For instance, let’s take the Idioms of the World campaigns Verve Search did for HotelClub.com and which won the European Search Awards.

If we we look only at its own social share metrics, we will have just a partial picture:

Instead, if we see what are the social shares metrics of the pages that linked and talked about it, we will have the complete picture.

As you can imagine, you can calculate the ROI of your editorial content using the same methodology.

Obviously the Fractl ROI calculator is far from being perfect, as it does not consider the offline repercussion a content campaign may have (the Idioms of the World campaign was organically published in a outstanding placement on The Guardian’s paper version, for instance), but it is a solid base for crafting your own ROI calculation.

Conclusions

So, we have arrived at the end of this personal guide about content and its metrics.

Remember these important things:

Don’t be data driven, be data informed;

Think strategically, act tactically;

Content’s metrics vary depending on the goals of content itself.

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“Man, I’m sorry. You guys weren’t ready to adopt the brands as publisher mindset. I suspected you’d never be ready to do it successfully. I knew it; I could sense you knew it. I wish I’d spoken up when I saw the intra-departmental debates waging. That’s on me. My bad.”

Those were my words to the executive of a midsize lifestyle brand I worked with in 2014. It took me months to get up the nerve to reach out and make it right, even though I’d done nothing wrong.

He seemed to understand. But he did have a question that stopped me in tracks and continues to haunt me.

“Ifwe couldn’t get it right, with all of our resources, what does it say about the feasibility of becoming a brand publisher?” he inquired. “Does that make content marketing [in and of itself] a bad idea?”

A fair question, to be sure, and one I did not have a sufficient answer for. But in looking back, I realized this exec, like so many others before him, made the mistake of thinking he could do quickly what he had not yet learned to do well. Content marketing wasn’t the missile that sank his boat. The decision to do content marketing at warp speed and with little direction was his brands’ albatross.

Four things doomed his efforts from the start, and each was self-induced:

He drank the brands-as-publishers Kool-Aid

He chose the wrong goals for his brand

He attempted to execute a plan that wasn’t meant for his business

He attempted to do content marketing by skipping the small but important steps

Any one of these could have led to failure. Facing them all at once is akin to content marketing suicide. I see these same four elements dooming content marketers so frequently that I’ve resorted to naming them the four horsemen of content marketing failure.

For the purposes of this post, I want to illuminate how attempting to be a brand publisher is a lofty, needless goal for all but a handful of brands. Then I will highlight how to make steps 2, 3, and 4 work for your brand, not against it.

Before I begin, however, I want to make one thing abundantly clear: The ideas shared in this post have been formed through working with hundreds of brands over more than a decade, either as a writer, business strategist, content strategist, product marketing consultant or in a PR/media relations capacity.

I’m under no illusion that each (or any of them) will apply to everyone, but experience has shown me that these elements play an invaluable role in the success (or failure) of most brands embarking on the content marketing journey.

Where content marketing went off course

The web is rife with examples of marketers sharing the “wisdom” of brands becoming publishers, and no less common are the examples of brands who’ve done just that, adding content publisher to the laundry list of services they already provide. Here’s the problem with that logic: You’re not a publisher, and attempting to become one is fraught with risks that more often than not lead to failure.

The logic of brands as publishers

Brand publishing refers to brands attempting to behave as media companies, specifically with regard to content breadth and frequency. Also, and most important, it requires a mindset wholly different from that of a typical content marketer: These brands view publishing as part of their business model.

That’s where the confusion comes in. A lot of very knowledgeable people say any brand that publishes blog posts or adds updates on social media is a brand publisher. But that’s akin to saying anyone who runs is a marathoner. It’s about scale. While content marketing’s goal is to attract and retain customers through the creation and distribution of content, being a brand publisher means you have layers of staff, strategic insight, vision, resources to build platforms for sharing new content and, most important, the ability to produce content at a rate that rivals, well, publishers.

If content marketing is a single-family dwelling, brand publishing is a city of one-million-plus.

It’s not that being a brand publisher is a bad idea all by itself. It’s that too many companies, who are barely ready to do content well, now think being a publisher is a sound idea.

As brands continue to bite off more than they can chew, the realities are tough to stomach, and have led to some interesting conclusions:

Brands who have and who can successfully make the transition to being a publisher can be very successful (e.g., seeing increased links and traffic, greater organic visibility, a significant lift in paid search and enviable social traction).

The number of brands who can successfully pull off being publishers is miniscule.

After months spent developing content strategies for clients looking for content marketing help, I decided that, in good conscience, I would never again insist that brands become publishers.

Instead, I adopted a strategy that’s as far away from one-size-fits-all as possible.

Good for business doesn’t mean good for your business

First, I refrained from using the term brand publisher. Next, I became a vocal proponent of the good-for-business-doesn’t-mean-good-for-your-business philosophy, which meant that in meetings with managers, directors and C-Suite execs, I had the courage of my convictions in sharing that while content marketing is a sound practice, becoming a full-fledged publisher is something that requires a minimum of three things to be successful:

Near-limitless resources: Take a look at the companies crushing it as true brand publishers, and you very quickly see why there aren’t many like them. Red Bull, consistently singled out as the leading brand-as-publisher, invests in the full gamut of content, including movies, books, TV shows, magazines and more. The privately held company doesn’t release figures related to those activities, but it’s likely in the tens of millions. “[The expense is] something we grapple with on a daily basis,” says Werner Brell, head of Red Bull Media House, the content arm of the brand. “It’s obviously expensive.”

Come-hell-or-high water commitment: If you choose the brand-as-publisher route, understand that you’ll get up close and personal with the word commitment. Aside from the financial commitment, including staff and the cost of producing content, you’d better be prepared for publish or perish to become part of your brand’s DNA. There is no “This isn’t working. Let’s change tactics.” This is your horse and you’ll keep riding it. It’s the lot you’ve chosen.

A change in your brand’s overall corporate philosophy: This is the big, hairy gorilla that (fortunately) saves many brands from dooming themselves from choosing the brand publisher route. Few C-Suite denizens are willing to disrupt their corporate model and add publishing to their mantle. And if you’re the VP of content or CMO, you’re wise to accept this level of restraint.

If your company is ready to shoulder such a commitment, then by all means dive right in. If not, there’s a better way to do content marketing, one that is no less effective but does not require you to mortgage your future in the process.

A better way: content marketing for your brand

Instead of attempting to become a publisher, or even a content marketer, focus your efforts on becoming a brand that consistently creates content that puts the needs of prospects and customers first, while simultaneously providing meaningful solutions to their problems.

I’ve been a very vocal haranguer of content marketing, though not because of its inefficacy.

Hopefully, at the core of your business is a product or service customers clamor for, not a content engine.

That’s why becoming a customer-first brand that has meaningful content as part of its DNA is the safest, surest, easiest-to-adopt model for brands with the desire to do content marketing right but who aren’t willing to re-org the business to get it underway.

At this point, I’m hoping you see the light, realizing that becoming a brand publisher isn’t necessary for your company to be successful at content marketing.

If you’re ready to chart a solid, more reliable path to success, it begins with turning away the four horsemen of content marketing failure.

We’ve banished the first horsemen. Let’s do the same with the other three.

Choose the right goals for your business

Whenever I sit down with a prospect to discuss their business, I open up my notebook and write down the following three phrases, including a checkbox next to each, on a sheet of paper:

“…Be successful.”

“…Rank No. 1 in Google.”

“…Increase…conversions.”

Then I ask “What are your goals for the business?” all the while knowing full well the answer will be one of the three things I’ve written down.

The followup question, too, is canned: “What are you doing to get there?” That answer, too, is typically never a surprise: “That’s what you’re here for, right?”

Wrong!

After I’ve apprised them that the shortest path to failure is nothaving a clear view of their goals, I have their attention and they are ready to begin the goal-setting process.

Here’s the catch: Only you and your team can decide what those goals are/should be. It’s important that the goals take into account the entirety of the business, not just SEO, content, social media, etc.

Also, I’ve found it helps if the metrics assigned to measure a business’s success toward their goals are meaningful (e.g., a sincere help to the overall business) and clearly communicated (e.g., everyone involved is aware of what they’re working for and being judged against).

No matter what specific goals you decide on, applying the principle of “HAS,” as in holistic, adherable (er, sticky) and sustainable, can be a huge help:

Holistic—Content marketing success requires that a lot of moving work parts in unison. Your goals must take into account the entirety of the business, though not all at once.

Adherable—How likely are you to stick with the goals, seeing them through to fruition? It won’t matter how sound your goals are if they don’t make sense for your business, or don’t make sense for your business at a given time.

Sustainable—Will you be able to maintain the needed level of effort for the goals to reach maturity?

I’ve found that keeping these principles top of mind helps to order a brand’s steps, ensuring that everyone is aware of the goals and of their role in working toward them.

As an example, let’s say you’re a small business ready to jump into the murky waters of content marketing, but you don’t yet have a website.

The right goal would be to launch a new website. To make the goal as HAS-friendly as possible, you could assign a timeframe—say, 90 days—then break out the associated tasks by order of importance (see image below).

I’d even suggest keeping a checklist in a Google Doc where team members can stay abreast of what’s going on, in addition to seeing who’s responsible for what and having a better understanding of where the team is in terms of completing each task related to their goals.

Execute a plan that’s right for your business

If I had to single out the No. 1 reason content marketers I’ve worked with have failed it would be that they based their goals on what the competition was doing instead of what’s best for their own business.

Seeing a competitor rank higher for their main keywords; having thousands of web pages indexed by Google; spending mad cash on paid media; and having brand pages on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, these businesses attempt to do the same.

Sounds comical, right, until you realize it happens all the time and to businesses of all sizes.

So we just had a new client shut down our social strategy to instead “copy anything and everything their competitors are doing” #brilliant

Aside from having little idea of how much real success the competition is enjoying from their search, social and content efforts, these brands are taking their eyes off the main prize: their own business.

An approach that works well and is easy to carry out entails taking an inventory or where you are in relation to where you want to be while keeping a keen eye on the competition.

With your goals solidly in hand, begin by sketching out a plan based not on where you are, or on what the competition is doing, but on those actions that would likely lead to success for you.

(image created by author)

In the graph above, created in Google Docs, you can see that I mainly focused on the content-related activities that would have the biggest impact over the next 90 days. (Caveat: This is simply a high-level overview of one area of the business, but it’s plenty thorough enough for a team to begin working from.)

The key is to take the time to get to know (a) what success looks like for your business, then (b) focus on specific, actionable elements that can be done in the allotted timeframe.

As marketers, we’ve seemingly trained a generation of brands that the focus should be on doing fast (and often) what they barely know how to do at all. We never learn to do well.

Yeah, I know it works…for some. But is it scalable over the long-term? Better yet, will it remain scalable into the future?

If you want to position your brand for success in content marketing, make sweating the small but oh-so-important steps a priority.

This process starts with clarity.

Begin by defining who you are and who you desire to be in the minds of your prospects and clients. I can see the eye-rolling. But without answers to these questions, you’re wasting your time and, likely, money. Devote the time to having weekly brainstorming sessions with your core team. During these meetings, keep the air open, relaxed and free-flowing, allowing ideas to bounce freely around the room. The goal is to start each meeting with a big question. Then let it “breathe.” Your first big question should be “Who are we?” followed by “Who are we to our customers?” Put on your introspection hats, viewing yourselves through the words and interactions of prospects and customers, who have likely shared comments via email, phone, text, and your website.

Ask “why” a lot. During Mozcon 2014, Wil Reynolds dropped a slide that gave me goosebumps:

Simple. Brilliant. What I loved about this slide and the line of thinking is it helps brands (and the staff who work for those brands) stay the course, focused on their already-defined objectives. For example, once you know who you are and who you are in the minds of your core prospects and customers, any actions you take should be done with this information in mind.

Therefore, if the team begins to get distracted by shiny-things syndrome, anyone has the right to ask “Why are we doing this?” or “Why does this…make sense?”

Nothing like forcing someone to defend a bad idea to provoke clarity.

Get to know your audience. The better you know your audience, the easier it is to market to them. Even if you cannot afford the fancy tools and platforms Mike King has previous talked about to develop personas, you can have staff members spend an hour each per week scouring social media, forums, discussions boards and sundry websites’ comments sections looking for people who are likely interested in the products/services your business offers. Gather as much information (e.g., age, income, occupation, etc.) about these people and their needs as possible, in addition to what sites they frequent, how often and for what. In this way, you’re developing personas without it feeling like an onerous task. Keep copious notes, which can be entered into a Google Doc and shared with teammates.

Build a community. I hate the term secret sauce, mainly because no such thing exists. However, if a brand wants to set itself apart from the competition, they should adopt this mentality: Get to know your audience, but build a community. An audience might read your blog, consume and share your information, and recognize your content from the rest of the pack. A community, however, is engaged and passionate, actively seeking out your content, sharing it broadly and fervently, and is easily willing to help in the creation of content for your business (e.g., YouMoz) Have your team keep a watchful eye on out for engaged, visible members of your audience, especially via social media. Share their content, answer their questions and, as resources permit, surprise them with personaliized GIFs or mail them skotskes. The audience-to-community threshold is smaller than you likely think.

Create and share meaningful content. Notice that I saved content creation until last. That’s no accident. Content marketing is cruelest to those who dive in headfirst without clear goals, lacking a plan of action and who’re content to simply “be on social media” or to “share some blogs.” If you’re committed to creating and sharing meaningful content, there are three areas you must focus on:

Inspire. People want to feel good about themselves and the work they’re doing. Why not use your content to help them and generate buzz for yourself in the process? For example, if your business sells email solutions for small business, a sizable portion of your content should cater to helping business owners “take back a part of your day.” When creating content, put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and ask yourself “What can I create that’ll inspire and compel them?” In this way, it’s less about the action you need them to take and more about tapping the emotion needed to bring that action to reality.

Immediacy. While evergreen contentcertainly deserves a spot in your quiver, make certain to offer content that speaks to the immediate needs of the community. This is when a sincere effort at thinking like a publisher comes in handy, especially if you have experts in-house who can speak, with your brand’s voice, to these needs. A great example is the job Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen are doing at sharing information regarding Google’s updates and important social media news. Look for ways your brands can contribute in a similar fashion.

Indispensability. Your content needs an I-can’t-do-without-this component. It’s the surest path to ensure your content gets read and shared; your website retains steady traffic; your blogs always have significant eyeballs; and your brand is sought-after online. Look at the job the Buffer folks are doing in educating their community on all thingssocial media, time management and productivity hacks. Their posts are read and shared by thousands daily, with many (including myself) seeing the blog as can’t-do-without material. Same for the excellent work the Bruce Clay, Inc. content team, whose comprehensive resources add a layer of “stickiness” to the brand that’s hard to beat. How can you do the same? Commit wholeheartedly to learning the needs of your community, especially those needs associated with pain points they desperately need removed. Creating content around these areas/topics is the easy part.

I can’t say for certain that, if you refrain from attempting to be a brand publisher, you’ll be a successful content marketer. I also cannot promise that going all-in with the three points outlined above ensures your success.

What, however, I can say is the vast majority of brands would do better if they banished “I want to be a brand publisher” from their lexicon and decided to focus on the right goals, executed a sensible plan and made the small things part of the main things.

What about you? Are you ready to do content marketing wisely? Dive into the discussion in the comments below.

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I’m receiving more and more questions from clients about how best to leverage paid content distribution and paid social platforms (here referred to together as ‘paid promotions’). There’s a lot of reason for increased interest—as content production has ramped up in digital marketing, it has become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and reach the audience you want. Facebook shutting down companies’ free lunch social distribution has only further pressed the issue—and sometimes you’ve simply maxed out on other paid channels!

But more than simply being an extra ‘pay to play’ option, paid promotion is a crucial part of any holistic digital marketing strategy. By using the range of paid online promotion and advertising tools available, we can take more comprehensive control in presenting the best user experience throughout the funnel—delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right person. There are three primary functions of paid promotions:

How and why you might use paid promotions will of course vary quite a bit, but regardless of your end goal, there are two key tasks for anyone seeking to succeed in doing so. Do these two things right, and you will have laid a solid foundation for achieving your goals.

First…

1. Define and target a specific audience

Defining a target audience in digital advertising or paid promotions is a more exacting exercise than usual, because we’re actually operationalizing a definition that can be precisely carried out by setting controls in a PPC-like interface. Think of it like programming a computer—you need to break down your definition in extremely concrete, exclusive terms that are interpretable by the tool you’re using. Don’t despair though—it’s not hard to do, and if you’ve been a good marketer and developed some proper user personas you’ll be ahead of the game!

Answer these questions to set a concrete definition of the people that should be targeted with a given campaign or content release. These are typically going to be the criteria you actually enter into an interface when starting a promotions campaign on a tool like Facebook or StumbleUpon.

Demographic Information – Our ideal target for this content is…

Age –Many platforms will offer simple age based targeting, usually in the form of your typical “18-24, 25 – 36” type brackets.

Gender – Again, this is a simple demographic setting and is often available. Think about setting up separate ‘A/B’ versions to separately address men and women when relevant!

Education Level/Status – Is your audience in school? Have they completed a degree? Facebook and LinkedIn will let you drill in on these parameters.

Geography – Be as specific as possible. Generally, the combination of a state/province and a metro area level is as granular as geotargeting options go.

There are a few more options you can find on places like Facebook -income level, marital status, employment status, and more can be particularly useful in B2C contexts.

Many platforms will also give you an opportunity to define your target audience by interests, so think about what relevant topics or subjects the target user might be particularly interested in or looking for while online! For example, likes for travel blogs, language learning sites, famous travel writers, country specific cuisine, etc all can be used to converge on a very specific type of person.

2. Choose promotion channels

Once your target audience has been defined and the above questions answered with the best data available, you must consider the channels or platforms that will best make use of it. There are three major factors:

Which platforms have targeting capabilities and an audience that can best replicate the user profile using their targeting?

Remember to weight the user’s expected online behavior heavily in selecting platforms – while one might offer targeting to match the most targeting characteristics, if your audience does not actively use the platform’s core service it is of little value as a promotional channel.

Which platforms can best present the media to be promoted?

It is important not to detract from the user’s experience of the content, or place it in a channel that does not fit it’s form. A long form video, for example, will not usually fare well in skippable preroll spots or on-site rollover placements.

Remember also that use of different platforms can depend on device – and so might the usability of your content!

What behavioral context is preferable to achieve your objectives for this piece?

I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to browse around as a user when making these decisions, in order to think less abstractly about the experience you aim to create. Choosing channels is often a case-by-case process, but for common objectives there are some simple, intuitive guidelines to keep in mind:

If you want your content shared, promote it on channels that have built-in sharing capabilities (social media, StumbleUpon).

If you want users to feel they’ve ‘discovered’ a piece, focus on content plug-ins (Outbrain, Zemanta, etc), discovery tools (StumbleUpon), and more niche placements (subreddits, subject blogs)—depending on the accessibility/simplicity.

If your goal is a high level of direct exposure for content at a low price, content discovery plugins and display ad networks can deliver. Cost is relatively low and inventory is high, so it’s easy to get eyeballs on your work.

If conveying authority is important, officially sponsored or openly disclosed promotions on respected media platforms or with trusted individual publishers can be a good tool—though often more expensive.

It can be useful to combine these guidelines to plan for more complex goals. For example, if you want to convey a sense of ‘discovery’ but also encourage sharing, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery could fulfill both these needs—the sponsorship is subtle, the user is in ‘discovery mode’, and SU has a social sharing frame right on top of the page. If that audience isn’t engaged enough, you might bring traffic to a piece via Reddit and retarget for sharing on Twitter.

Planning for promotion should not be an exclusively post hoc activity—the content itself should be created with intended placement and utility in mind. Engage early in the process as goals for the content are first set, so that creative development and objectives do not ultimately conflict with the feasibility of promotions. Simply being involved in the conversation to flag potential problems is often enough!

Think outside of yourself…

One of the most critical parts of this framework is leveling what you want to achieve with what users will accept and value in a given medium, so I want to take a moment to reinforce the importance of this.

In answering questions of targeting and placement in a performance-driven world, it can be dangerously easy to think egocentrically, only in terms of what YOU want your customer to do in a given context—or more insidiously,what you want them to want to do. Remember that as a marketer or advertiser you are necessarily carrying tremendous baggage, both in terms of product knowledge and expectations. It’s tremendously important to step back from your own (or your company’s) perspective and think as a user.

What you ultimately need to reach your goals isn’t necessarily what individuals using one of these channels wants when doing so, or are ready to do. Take the time to understand your audience and reach out to them in a way will resonate with the journey they are on.

What considerations do you pay special attention to when promoting content? Are there areas of the discipline you’d love to learn more about? Hit me back in the comments!

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Picture it. A room full of executives from a company you never thought you could land as a client. They’re so engaged in what they are saying that they’re leaning forward in their chairs. The CEO looks poised to ask a question but you can tell she doesn’t want to interrupt your flow.

Still, sometimes you just want to peek over someone else’s shoulder at a concrete example to see if there’s anything you can learn. This can be especially true if you’re working in-house and don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of.

What a content strategy should look like

Content strategies take many forms, from a 50-page word document to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation. That means this template is not meant to be gospel. Instead, it introduces you to the many moving parts that make up a content strategy and gives you an example of how I, based on the years I spent consulting on content strategies for everything from stock photography to software as a service, would write it up.

Peek over my shoulder to get your next strategy started, or just to get a glimpse of how someone else approaches a strategy. Build on this template and make it your own. You’ll find that the template is written from an agency perspective (with lots of references to “the client”) but it works equally well if you are in-house and are writing for that one, all-important client—your boss.

What goes into a content strategy

The content strategy template walks you through researching and writing up the three key elements of a content strategy: what content looks like now, what it should look like, and the ecosystem in which content is created.

Content today

A strategy should provide an assessment of the client’s current content, as well as insight into their competitors’ content. That assessment may include any or all of the following:

Personas

Stakeholder interviews

Content inventory

Content audit

Gap analysis

Competitive analysis

Content in the future

Then you want to show your client where the content should take them and how they can use various channels to get there. Some ofmany places content resides are:

Onsite content

Homepage

Landing pages

Category pages

Product descriptions

Blog

Error pages

Etc.

Offsite content

Emails

Social media

Brochures

Packaging

Invoices

Voicemail messages

Etc.

Governance (aka the content ecosystem)

Finally, you want to think about the environment in which the content gets created—the governance of content. This includes:

Brand, voice, and style guidelines

Workflow analysis

Best practices for writing on the web

SEO tips

Editorial calendar

See the template for more in-depth descriptions of all of these elements as well as some of my favorite tools to get them done.

Again, take these pieces and use them to create your own template. Each strategy you do will require its own tweaks, but this will give you the leg up to put your own stamp on this emerging field.

The storytelling of content strategy

My brand of content strategy, and you’ll see this reflected a little in the template, is that a content strategy is a story. For a deeper understanding of this, check out the Mozinar I gave a few weeks ago,The Storytelling of Content Strategy.

Basically, I advocate for taking the elements of fiction and using them to get a fresh perspective on a brand’s journey toward a goal.

Here’s how the five elements of a story are also the basis of a content strategy:

1. Brands and customers are heroes

A content strategy can either be about a brand’s journey to land a customer (useful when a brand is new or has lost its way), or a content strategy can be about a customer’s journey and how the brand can help. See the webinar for an example of each.

2. Your current landscape is your ground situation

You can’t start a strategy until you know where your hero is coming from. Most of the initial research you do—fromstakeholder interviews to content inventories and audits—is to understand the starting point of your strategy. This is where the journey begins. You will be measuring all future success against the understanding you build of this landscape.

3. Goals articulate your central desire

You can’t plot a strategy if you don’t know what direction the brand wants to grow. Goals should come from the brand itself, but you might find that the brand needs a little coaching. It’s helpful if you distinguish overall business goals from content goals. They are related, but there are some goals (e.g. reducing employee turnover) that content plays a much smaller role in achieving. Setting specific goals for your content strategy also lets you get more granular about some goals in which content is the star player (e.g. increasing email open rate).

4. Competitors are antagonists

Even if you’re going to write the most TAGFEE content strategy ever, you still need to figure out where your competitors are and how you can learn from their example. And it’s important to remember that because of the way search engines work, your business competitors might be different than your SERP competitors. Ideally a content strategy will address both.

5. Plot is strategy

At this point in the story, you know who the players are, what’s working and what’s not, and have some ideas about how to move forward to achieve those goals.

When I write up a strategy, I think about them as though I were plotting a novel. Each tactic or channel is a way to move the brand closer to those goals. What obstacles might they encounter? Who are they competing with in the space? How can they master this tactic or channel? And how can content help them achieve their goals and ride happily off into the sunset?

Making a content strategy your own

Now it’s time todownload that template and see what story your content strategy is trying to tell. Once you’re confident in the strategy you’re presenting, you’ll have the complete attention of every executive in that conference room. And, with any luck, they’ll refer you to their friends.

I want to learn from you, too. Is there anything you’d include in the template that I haven’t covered? Do you have any strategies for success in presenting content strategies or any lessons learned? Please share your ideas and stories in the comments.

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Do you want a free tool that tracks your organic search rankings in Amazon? Yes? You’re in luck.

I am going to show you how to build your own organic search rank tracking tool using Kimono Labs and Excel.

This is a follow-up to my last post about how to rank well in Amazon, which covered the basic inputs to Amazon’s ranking algorithm. It received a lot of comments about my rank-tracking prototype in Google Docs; the Moz community is overflowing with smart people who immediately saw the need for a tool to track their progress. As luck would have it, something in Google Sheets broke the day after I published, so I had to replicate the rank tracking tool in Excel using the SEOTools for Excel plugin. The Excel tool is a low-setup way to record your progress, but if you want to track more than a few terms, it is very laborious. I’ve since built a more (but not completely) automated, scalable way to track rankings using Kimono Labs to scrape the data and Excel to run the reports.

Pros and cons of rank tracking

The death ofGoogleranktracking has been widely reported, so I feel compelled to review why Amazon rank tracking is both useful and a terrible KPI.

Amazon rank tracking is great because…

You get feedback on your content optimization. How else are you going to determine if your content changes actually produce a positive effect?

It can provide a possible explanation for increases in listing traffic and sales. Amazon doesn’t provide traffic source data so you’re often left guessing about the source of changes.

Amazon rank tracking is a terrible KPI because…

You have no way of assigning a monetary value to a rank. Amazon does not report on search query volume, you don’t know how well your users convert for each keyword, you don’t know the click-through-rate at each position, and you don’t know what percentage of users use organic search vs. other methods of finding your product.

Many factors besides rankings will drive your success on Amazon. Inventory outages, winning the Buy Box, and a good seller rating will impact sales drastically and directly. You can even assign revenue and profit numbers to some of those attributes.

So use rankings as a leading indicator of traffic and sales improvements and to see if your changes are making a difference.

Build the scraper

Extract structured data from an Amazon search

Kimono Labs has some great documentation on using their tools. If, at any point, you get lost or want to do something slightly different from my scraper, you can findtheir documentation here. I’m going to show you the fastest way to copy my existing scraper so you can get up and running as quickly as possible.

To make things faster, you can copy the Xpath I use to identify the listing title and the ASIN (Amazon’s unique product identifier) from here:

Listing: div > div > div > h3 > a

ASIN: div > div.prod.celwidget

Next we’ll select which attributes to scrape from the elements we identified with the XPath. For the Listing property’s attributes, we’ll select the Text Content and href then click Apply.

For the ASIN attribute, we’ll select id and name. Deselect the other attributes that are selected by default, then click Apply.

So long as Amazon hasn’t changed the number of results they display by the time you are reading this, the two yellow circles at the top of the toolbar will say 15. That means that for each property defined, Kimono Labs has identified 15 different instances on the page. Does your screen look like this? If so, click Save.

Give your scraper a fancy name, tag it if you want, and decide how often you want it to run. I set mine to run daily. Kimono Labs will store a new version of the data every time it runs so if you don’t record it one day, the older data will still be there. I could have it scrape hourly but then it’s more laborious to go back through the data and find the version I want to save.

Click on the link to view your scraper. To verify that the data is gathering correctly, click on the Preview Results tab and select the CSV endpoint. You should see the title in the Listing.text field, a link to the listing in Listing.href, the ASIN in ASIN.name, and the rank in ASIN.id.

Finally, to make sure that Kimono Labs is gathering and saving data correctly, go to the API Detail tab and switch Always Save to On.

Then go to Pagination/Crawling and make sure crawling is turned on.

Congratulations! You just made a scraper that will record the ranking of every product for the keyword “juicer” every single day!

Which types of searches do you want to monitor?

There are many types of searches in Amazon. You can search for a keyword, brand, category, and any combinations of those. I’ll explain the URL parameters used to generate the searches so users can track whichever ranking is most important to your business. You will use these parameters to construct your list of URLs to crawl in Kimono Labs.

To start with, this URL can be used as a base for all Amazon searches: http://www.amazon.com/s. We will add the parameter name-value pairs to the end to construct our search.

Name

Example Value

Description

field-keywords

Juicer

Add any keyword that you want to track

field-brandtextbin

Breville

Add any brand name. It must exactly match the brand name listed for the product in Amazon.

Here are a few notes that will be helpful (even critical) as you construct your searches.

Place a question mark (?) before your first parameter

Separate subsequent parameters with an ampersand (&)

You cannot search for a brand by itself; it can only be used in conjunction with a keyword or a node. I don’t know why.

Once you create every search URL, add them to the “List URLs to Crawl” field in Kimono Labs on the Pagination/Crawling tab.

Transform and store the data in Excel

Now that we’re scraping and storing rankings data for your searches every day, we want to display the data in a useful format. You could talk to a developer to hook into your Kimono Labs API, or you can download the data as a CSV and store it in Excel.

I’ll use this Excel template to transform my data into a more readable format, store the data, and create reports.

Transform

Paste the data into cell A2 of the Excel file. If the data ends up filling only the first column, go to Data >> Text to Columns. Select Delimited, click Next, select Comma, and click Finish. Your data should end up looking like this.

I use the table on the right to transform the data in a few key ways. I’ll explain each.

ASIN: I don’t transform this data; I just copy it as is. If it shows a number instead of an alphanumeric string, that’s an ISBN. It’s probably a book, movie, or cd that’s ranking

Title: Again, I’m not transforming the title, just copying it over.

Keyword: The keyword is included in the Listing.href on the left as part of the URL. I made a really long formula to extract just the keyword and replace plus symbols with spaces.

Date: This uses Excel’s TODAY() function which simply returns the current days date. If you’re adding data that is from a previous day, replace this date with whichever date is correct.

Rank: I remove the “result_” from the beginning of the ASIN.id field on the left and add one since the rankings start at zero.

Store historical data

If you continue adding data day after day, you can begin to see a change in rankings; copy the data from the table on the right (not the headers).

Then go to the Historical sheet and paste values at the bottom of the table. You just want to paste values, not formulas:

The table should automatically expand to include the new data. If not, click on the corner of the table and drag it down to include the new data. Next, click on the Data tab in the ribbon, then click Refresh All; the pivot tables in the Table and Graph sheets will now include the new data.

Build some useful reports with pivot tables and charts

In the Excel Template, I added a Pivot Table and Pivot Chart that you can use to report on the Data. The Historical data sheet has six days of rankings data. You may want to skip this section and just watch Annie Cushing’s videos on creatingpivot charts and pivot tables. Once you are comfortable with pivot charts and tables, you can look at the data however you want.

Here are a few useful rankings charts and tables I use to look at rankings data. I’ve included the visualization as well as my settings in the screenshot.

All ranked keywords for a product over time

This chart displays all the keyword rankings for one product over time. I use the ASIN to filter the chart instead of the title, because the title for a listing can change over time but the ASIN won’t. This product ranks for both of our keywords and has moved around slightly throughout the six days we’ve tracked (there are no rankings on 7/31 and 8/1 for “masticating juicer” because I was not scraping data for this keyword on those days).

Two competing products for one keyword

This chart compares two products for one keyword. If you are monitoring a key competitor or have multiple products for your brand, this is a useful view. I used the filters to select the keyword “juicer” and the two products.

Rank by day

To quickly pick out which products improved or lost ranking over a time period, I use a table. In the row labels I group each rank by keyword then ASIN. I add Title below ASIN so I can recognize which product is moving up or down.

To the right of the table, I added a formula to subtract the rank on 8/2 from the rank on 8/5 (=G7-D7). To make it more obvious which products improved and which did worse, I added conditional formatting to highlight negative numbers with red and positive numbers with green.

Is there another view you’d like me to demonstrate? Ask me in the comments.

Limitations

This system for tracking and reporting rankings is not perfect.

You must manually download the data from Kimono Labs to Excel to run a report. That’s a bit clunky. This process could be automated with some code.

Kimono Labs is still in free Beta so stability is an issue. Scraping, as a general rule, fails fairly often and I’ve experienced spotty page loading. They allow you to scrape and store an impressive amount of data for free though. If you know of a better, free tool be sure to let everyone know in the comments.

Excel itself is a limitation. If you get beyond 500,000 rows of data it will start to crawl. That may sound like a lot, but if you want to track 5 pages of results for 100 keywords every day, you will generate 8,000 rows of data per day. Excel is not a long-term solution.

My company is working on a rankings tool that will address all of these limitations, but it is a couple months away. If you want an email when it’s ready, fill out the formhere. For now, I’m living with the limitations of this system and getting some great insight.

Questions?

This post has a really long list of steps so if you have an issue, let me know via email (my first name @dnaresponse.com) or in the comments.

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PPC and SEO go better together. By playing both sides of the coin, it’s possible to make more connections and achieve greater success in your online marketing than with either alone.

That the data found in search query reporting within AdWords can be a valuable source of information inkeyword research is well known. Managing the interaction effects of sharing the SERPs and capturing reinforcing real estate on the page is of course important. Smart marketers will use paid search to test landing pages and drive traffic to support experiments on the site itself. Harmony between paid and organic search is a defining feature of well executed search engine marketing.

Unfortunately, that’s where the game all too often stops, leaving a world of possibilities for research and synergy waiting beyond the SERPs on the Google Display Network. Today I want to give you a couple techniques to kick your paid/organic collaboration back into gear and get more mileage from combining efforts across the disciplines.

Using the display network

If you’re not familiar with it already, the GDN is essentially the other side of AdSense, offering the ability to run banner, rich media, and even video ads across the network from AdWords or Doubleclick. There are two overarching methods of targeting these ads: by context/content, and by using remarketing lists. Regardless of your chosen method, ads here are about as cheap as you can find (often under a $1 CPC), making them a prime tool for exploratory research and supporting actions.

Contextual and content-based targeting offers some simple and intuitive ways to extend existing methods of PPC and SEO interaction. By selecting relevant topics, key phrases, or even particular sites, you can place ads in the wild to test the real world resonance of taglines and imagery with people consuming content relevant to yours.

You can also take a more coordinated approach during a content marketing campaign using the same type of targeting. Enter a unique phrase from any placements you earn on pages using AdSense as a keyword target, and you can back up any article or blog post with a powerful piece of screen real estate and a call to action that is fully under your control. This approach mirrors thetactic of using paid search ads to better control organic results, and offers a direct route to conversion that usually would not otherwise exist in this environment.

Research with remarketing

Remarketing on AdWords is a powerful tool to drive conversions, but it also produces some very interesting and frequently neglected data in the proces:Your reports will tell you which other sites and pages your targeted audience visits once your ads display there. You will, of course, be restricted here to sites running AdSense or DoubleClick inventory, but this still adds up to over 2 million potential pages!

If your firm is already running remarketing, you’ll be able to draw some insights from your existing data, but if you have a specific audience in mind, you may want to create a new list anyway. While it is possible to create basic remarketing lists natively in AdWords, I recommend using Google Analytics to take advantage of the advanced segmentation capabilities of the platform. Before beginning, you’ll need to ensure that your AdWords account is linked and your tracking code is updated.

Creating your remarketing list

First, define who exactly the users you’re interested in are. You’re going to have to operationalize this definition based on the information available in GA/UA, so be concrete about it. We might, for example, want to look after users who have made multiple visits within the past two weeks to peruse our resources without completing any transactions. Where else are they bouncing off to instead of closing the deal with us?

If you’ve never built a remarketing list before, pop into the creation interface in GA through Admin > Remarketing > Audiences. Hit the big red ‘+ Audience’ button to get started. You’re first presented with a selection of list types:

The first three options are the simplest and least customizable, so they won’t be able to parse out our theoretical non-transactors, but can be handy for this application nonetheless. TheSmart List option is a relatively new and interesting option. Essentially, this will create a list based on Google’s best algorithmic guess at which of your users are most likely to convert upon return to your site. The ‘black box’ element to Smart Lists makes it less precise as a tool here, but it’s simple to test and see what it turns up.

The next three are relatively self explanatory; you can gather all users, all users to a given page, or all that have completed a conversion goal. Where it gets truly interesting is when you create your own list using segments. All the might of GA opens up here for you to apply criteria for demographics, technology/source, behavior, and even advanced conditions and sequences. Very handily, you can also import any existing segments you’ve created for other purposes.

In this figure, we’re simply translating the example from above into some criteria that should fairly accurately pick out the individuals in which we are interested.

Setting up and going live

When you’ve put your list together, simply save it and hop back over to AdWords. Once it counts at least 100 users in its target audience, Google will let you show ads using it as targeting criteria. To set up the ad group, there are a few key considerations to bear in mind:

You can further narrow your sample using AdWords’ other targeting options, which can be very handy. For example, want to know only what sites your users visit within a certain subject category? Plug in topic targeting. I won’t jump down the rabbit hole of possibilities here, but I encourage you to think creatively in using this capability.

You’ll of course need fill the group with some actual ads for it to work. If you can’t get some applicable banner ads, you can create some simple text ads. We might be focusing on the research data to be had in this particular group, but remember that users are still going to see and potentially click these ads, so make sure you use relevant copy and direct them to an appropriate landing page.

To hone down on unique and useful discoveries, consider setting some of the big generic inventory sources like YouTube as negative targets.

Finally, set a reasonable CPC bid to ensure your ads show. $0.75 to $1.00 should be sufficient; if your ads aren’t turning up many impressions with a decent sized list, push the number up a bit.

To check on the list size and status, you can find it in Shared Library > Audiences or back in GA. Once everything is in place, set your ads live and start pulling in some data!

Getting the data

You won’t get your numbers back overnight, but over time you will collect a list of the websites your remarketed ads show on: all the pages across the vast Google Display Network that your users visit. To find it, enter AdWords and select the ad group you set up. Click the “Display Network” and “Placements” tabs:

You’ll see a grid showing the domain level placements your remarketing lists have shown on, with the opportunity to customize the columns of data included. You can sift through the data on a more granular level by clicking “see details;” this will provide you with page level data for the listed domains. You’re likely to see a chunk of anonymized visits; there is aworkaround to track down the pages in here, but be advised it will take a fair amount of extra effort.

Tada! There you are—a lovely cross section of your target segment’s online activities. Bear in mind you can use this approach with contextual, topic, or interest targeting that produces automatic placements as well.

Depending on your needs, there are of course myriad ways to make use of display advertising tools in sync with organic marketing. Have you come up with any creative methods or intriguing results? Let us know in the comments!

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This is Inflow’s process for doing content audits.It may not be the “best” way to do them every time, but we’ve managed to keep it fairly agile in terms of how you choose to analyze, interpret and make recommendations on the data. The fundamental parts of the process remain about the same across numerous types of websites no matter what their business goals are: Collect all of the content URLs on the site and fetch the data you need about each URL. Then analyze the data and provide recommendations for each content URL. Theoretically it’s simple. In practice, however, it can be a daunting exercise if you don’t have a plan or process in place. By the end of this post we hope you’ll have a good start on both.

The many purposes of a content audit

A content audit can help in a variety of different ways, and the approach can be customized for any given scenario. I’ll write more about potential “scenarios” and how to approach them below. For now, here are some things a content audit can help you accomplish…

Determine the most effective way to escape a Panda penalty

Determine which pages need copywriting / editing

Determine which pages need to be updated and made more current, and prioritize them

Determine which pages should be consolidated due to overlapping topics

Determine which pages should be pruned off the site, and what the approach to pruning should be

Find the strongest pages on a domain and develop a strategy to leverage them

Uncover content marketing opportunities

Auditing and creating an inventory of content assets when buying/selling a website

Understanding the content assets of a new client (i.e. what you have to work with)

And many more…

A content audit case study

Inflow’s technical SEO specialistRick Ramos performed an earlier version of our content audit last year forPhases Design Studio, who graciously permitted us to share their case study. After taking an inventory of all content URLs on the domain, Rick outlined a plan to noindex/follow and remove from their sitemap many of the older blog posts that were no longer relevant, and weren’t candidates for a content refresh. The site also had a series of campaign-based landing pages dating back from 2006. These pages typically had a life cycle of a few months, but were never removed from the site or Google’s index. Rick recommended that these pages be 301 redirected to a few evergreen landing pages that would be updated whenever a new campaign was launched—a tactic that works particularly well on seasonal pages for eCommerce sites (e.g. 2014 New Years Resolution Deals). Still more pages were candidates to be updated / refreshed, or improved in other ways.

The results

Shortly after the recommendations were implemented the client called to ask if we knew why they were suddenly seeing eight times the amount of leads they were used to seeing month over month.

Why we think it worked

There are several probable reasons why this approach worked for our client. Here are a few of them…

The PageRank from dozens of expired campaign landing pages was consolidated into a relatively few evergreen pages (via 301 redirects and consolidation of internal linking signals).

Crawl budget is now being used more efficiently.

This improved the overall customer experience on the site, as well as organic search rankings for important topic areas that were consolidated.

Since then we have refined and improved the process and have been performing them on a variety of sites with great success. It works particularly well for panda recoveries on large-scale content websites, and for prioritizing which eCommerce product copy needs to be rewritten first.

A 50,000-foot overview of our process

Inflow’s content auditing process changes depending on the client’s goals, needs and budget. Generally speaking, however, here is how we approach it…

Match non-ranking keywords to the best page for guiding on-page changes

Do content gap ideation

Use keywords that did not have an appropriate page match to fill in the Content Gap tab.

Optional: Incorporate buying cycles into content gap ideation

Write the content strategy

Summarize the findings and present a strategy for optimizing existing pages, creating new pages to fill gaps, explain how many pages are being removed, redirected, etc…

Each piece of the process can be customized for the needs of a particular website.

For example, when auditing a very large content site with lots of duplicate/thin/overlapping content issues we may skip the entire keyword research and content gap analysis part of the process and focus on pruning the site of these types of pages and improving the rest. Alternatively, a site without much content may need to focus on keyword research and content gaps. Other sites may be looking specifically for content assets that they can improve, repeat in new ways or leverage for newer content. One example of a very specific goal would be to identify interlinking opportunities from strong, older pages to promising, newer pages. For now it is sufficient to know thatthe framework can be changed as needed in a way that could dramatically affect where you spend your time in the process, or even which steps you may want to skip altogether.

Our documents

There are several major steps in the content auditing process that require various documents. While I’m not providing links to our internal SOP documentation (mainly because it’s still evolving), I will describe each document and provide screenshots and links to examples / templates so you can have a foundation around which to customize one for your own needs.

Content audit scenarios

We keep a list of recommendations for common scenarios to guide our approach to content audits. While every situation is unique in its own ways, we find this helps us get 90% of the way to the appropriate strategy for each client much faster. I discuss this in more detail later, but if you’d like to take a peek click here.

Content audit dashboard spreadsheet

We were originally working within Google Docs, but as we started pulling in from more sources and performing more vLookups the spreadsheet would load so slowly on big sites as to make it nearly impossible to complete an audit. For this reason we have recently moved the entire process over to Excel, thoughthis template we’re providing is in Google Docs format. Below are some of the tabs you may want in this spreadsheet…

The “Content Audit” tab

This tab within the dashboard is where most of the work is done. Other tabs pull data from this one by VLookup. Whether the data is fetched by API and compiled by one tool (e.g. URL Profiler) or exported manually from many tools and compiled manually (by VLookup), the end result should be that you have all of the metrics needed for each URL in one place so you can begin sorting by various metrics to discern patterns, spot opportunities and make educated decisions on how to handle each piece of content, and the content strategy of the site as a whole.

You can customize the process to include whatever metrics you’d like to use. Here are the ones we’ve ended up with after some experimentation, as well as the source of the data:

Action (internal)

Leave As-Is

Improve

Consolidate

Remove

Strategy (internal)

A more detailed version of “action”. Example: Remove and 301 redirect to /another-page/.

Page Type (internal via URL patterns or CMS export)

This is and optional step for certain situations. Example: Article, Product, Category…

Our recommendations typically fall into one of four “Action” categories: “Keep As-Is”, “Remove”, “Improve”, or “Consolidate”. Further details (e.g. remove and 404, or remove and 301? If 301, to where?) are provided in a column called “Strategy”. Some URLs (the important ones) will have highly customized strategies, while others may have been bulk processed, meaning thousands could share the same strategy (e.g. rewriting duplicate product description copy). The “Action” column is limited in choices so we can sort the data effectively (e.g. see all pages marked as “removed”) while the “Strategy” column can be more free-form and customized to the URL (e.g. consolidate /buy-blue-widgets/ content into /buying-blue-widgets/ and 301 redirect the former to the latter to avoid duplicating the same topic).

The “Keyword Research” tab

This tab includes keywords gathered from a variety of sources, including brainstorming for seed keywords, mining Google Webmaster Tools, PPC campaigns, the AdWords Keyword Planner and several other tools. Search Volume and Ad Competition (not shown in this screenshot) are pulled from Google’sKeyword Planner. The average ranking position comes from GWT, as does the top ranking page. The relevancy score is something we typically ask the client to do once we’ve cleaned out most of the obvious junk keywords.

The “Keyword Matrix” tab

This tab includes URLs for important pages, and those that are ranking for – or are most qualified to rank for – important topics. It essentially matches up keywords with the best possible page to guide our copywriting and on-page optimization efforts.

Sometimes the KWM tab plays an important role in the process, like when the site is relatively new or unoptimized. Most of the time it takes a back-seat to other tabs in terms of strategic importance.

The “Content Gaps” tab

This is where we put content ideas for high-volume, highly relevant keywords for which we could not find an appropriate page. Often it involves keywords that represent stages in the buying cycle or awareness ladder that have been overlooked by the company. Sometimes it plays an important role, such as with new and/or small sites. Most of the time this also takes a back-seat to more important issues, like pruning.

The “Prune” tab

If it was marked for “Remove” or “Consolodate” it should be on this tab. Whether it is supposed to be removed and 301 redirected, canonicalized elsewhere, consolidated into another page, allowed to stay up but with a robots “noindex” meta tag, removed and allowed to 404/410… or any number of “strategies” you might come up with, these are the pages that will no longer exist once your recommendations have been implemented. I find this to be a very useful tab. For example, one could export this tab, send it to a developer (or a company likeWP Curve), and have someone get started on most or all of the implementation. Our mantra for low-quality, under-performing content on sites that may have a Panda-related traffic drop is to improve it or remove it.

“Imported Data” tabs

In addition to the tabs above, we also have data tabs that are in the spreadsheet to house exported data from the various sources so we can perform Vlookups based on the URL to populate data in other tabs. These data tabs include:

GWT Top Queries

GWT Top Pages

CopyScape Scores (typically for up to 1,000 URLs)

Keyword Data

The more data that can be compiled by a tool like URL Profiler, the fewer data tabs you’ll need and the faster this entire process will go. Before we built the internal tool to automate parts of the process, we also had tabs for GA data, Moz data, and the initial Screaming Frog export.

If you don’t know how to do a Vlookup there are plenty of online tutorials for Excel and GoogleDocs Spreadsheets.Here’s one I found useful for Excel. Alternatively, you could import all of the data into the tabs and ask someone more spreadsheet-savvy on your team to do the lookups. Our resident spreadsheet guru is Caesar Barba, and he has great hair. Below is an example of a simple Vlookup used to bring the “Action” over from the Content Audit tab for a URL in the Keyword Matrix tab…

=VLOOKUP(A2,’Content Audit’!A:C,3,FALSE)

Content Strategy

The Content Audit Dashboard is just what we need internally: A spreadsheet crammed with data that can be sliced and diced in so many useful ways that we can always go back to it for more insight and ideas. Some clients appreciate it as well, but most are going to find the greater benefit in our final content strategy, which includes a high-level overview of our recommendations from the audit.

Recommended exports and data sources

There are many options for getting the data you need into one place so you can simultaneously see a broad view of the entire content situation, as well as detailed metrics for each URL. For URL gathering we useScreaming Frog and Google Analytics. For data we use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), Google Analytics (GA), Social Count (SC), Copyscape (CS), Moz, CMS exports, and a few other data sources as needed.

However we’ve been experimenting with usingURL Profiler instead of our internal tool to pull all of these data-sources together much faster. URL Profiler is a few hundred bucks and is very powerful. It’s also somewhat of a pain to set up the first time, so be prepared for several hours of wrangling down API keys before getting all of the data you need.

No matter how you end up pulling it all together in the end, doing it yourself in Excel is always an option for the first few times.

A step-by-step example of our process

Below is the step-by-step process for an “average” client – whatever that means. Let’s say it isa medium-sized eCommerce client with about 800-900 pages indexed by Google, including category, product, blog posts and other pages. They don’t have an existing penalty that we know of, but could certainly be at risk of being affected by Panda due to some thin, overlapping, duplicate, outdated and irrelevant content on the site.

Step 1: Assess the situation and choose a scenario

Every situation is different, but we have found common similarities based on two primary factors – The size of the site and its content-based penalty risk. Below is a screenshot from our list of recommended strategies for common content auditing scenarios, which can be foundhere on GoInflow.com.

Each of the colored boxes drops down to reveal the strategy for that scenario in more detail.

The site described above would fall into the second box within purple column (Focus: Content Audit with an eye to Improve and/or Prune, followed by KWM for key pages). Here is the reasoning behind that…

The site is in danger of a penalty (though it does not appear to have one “yet”) so we follow the Panda matra:Improve it or Remove it. The size of the site determines which of those two (improve or remove) gets the most attention. Smaller sites need less pruning (scalpel), while larger sites need much more (hatchet). Smaller sites often need some keyword research to determine if they are covering all of the topic areas for various stages in the customer’s buying cycle, while larger sites typically have the opposite problem —> too many pages covering overlapping topic areas with low-quality (thin, duplicate, irrelevant, outdated, poorly written, automated…) content. Such a site would not require the keyword research, and would therefore not be getting a keyword matrix or content gap analysis, as the focus would be primarily about pruning the site.

Our focus in this example will be to audit the content with an eye to improve and/or Remove low performing pages, followed by keyword research and a keyword matrix for the primary pages, including the home page, categories, blog home and key product pages, as well as certain other topical landing pages.

As it turns out, this hypothetical website has lots of manufacturer-supplied product descriptions. We’re going to need to prioritize which ones get rewritten first because the client does not have the cash-flow to do them all at once. When budget and time is a concern, we typically shoot for the 80/20 rule: Write great content for the top 20% of pages right away, and do the other 80% over the course of 6-12 months as time/budget permit.

Because this site doesn’t have an existing penalty, we will recommend that all pages stay indexed. If they had a penalty already, we would recommend they noindex,follow the bottom 80% of pages, gradually releasing them back into the index as they are rewritten. This may not be the way you choose to handle the same situation, which is fine, but the point is you can easily sort the pages by any number of metrics to determine a relative “priority”. The bigger the site and tighter the budget, the more important it is to prioritize what gets worked on first.

Causes of Content-Related Penalties

For the purpose of a content audit we are only concerned with content-related penalties (as opposed to links and other off-page issues), which typically fall under three major categories: Quality, Duplication, and Relevancy. These can be further broken down into other issues, which include – but are not limited to:

Stub Pages (e.g. “No content is here yet, but if you sign in and leave some user-generated-content then we’ll have content here for the next guy”. By the way, want our newsletter? Click an AD!)

Indexable internal search results

Too many indexable blog tag or blog category pages

And so forth and so-on…

If you are unsure about the scale of the site’s content problems, feel free to do step 2 before deciding on a scenario…

Step 2: Scan the site

We useScreaming Frog for this step, but you can adapt this process to whatever crawler you want. This is how we configure the spider’s “Basic” and “Advanced” tabs…

And the advanced tab…

Notice that “crawl all subdomains” is checked. This is optional, depending on what you’re auditing. We are respecting “meta robots noindex”, “rel = canonical” and robots.txt. Also notice that we arenot crawling images, CSS, JS, flash, external links…. This type of stuff is what we look at in a Technical SEO Audit, but would needlessly complicate a “Content” Audit. What we’re looking for here are all of the indexable HTML pages that might lead a visitor to the site from the SERPs, though it may certainly lead to the discovery of technical issues.

Export the complete list of URLs and related data from Screaming Frog into a CSV file.

Step 3: Import the URLs and start the tool

We have our own internal “Content Auditing Tool”, which takes URLs and data from Screaming Frog and Google Analytics, de-dupes them, and pulls in data from Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, Social Count and Copyscape for each URL. The tool is a bit buggy at times, however, so I’ve been experimenting withURL Profiler, which can essentially accomplish the same goal with fewer steps and less upkeep. We need the “Agency” version, which is about $400 per year, plus tax. That’s not too bad, considering we’d already spent several thousand on our internal tool by the time Gareth Brown released URL Profiler publicly. :-/

Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see after downloading the tool. I’ve highlighted the boxes we currently check, though it depends on the tools/APIs to which you already subscribe and will differ by user. We’ve only just started playing with uClassify for the purpose of semi-automating our topic bucketing of pages, but I don’t have a process to share yet (feel free to comment with advice)…

Right-click on the URL List box and choose “Import From File”, then choose the ScreamingFrog export or any other list of URLs. There are also options to import from the clipboard or XML sitemap. Full documentation for URL Profilercan be found here. Below are two output screenshots to give you an idea of what you’re going to end up with…

The output changes depending on which boxes you check and what API access you have.

Step 4: Import the tool output into the dashboard

As described in the 50,000 foot overview above, we have a spreadsheet template with multiple tabs, one of which is the “Content Audit” tab.The tool output gets brought into the Content Audit tab of the dashboard. Our internal tool automatically ads columns for Action, Strategy, Page Type and Source (of the URL). You can also add these to the tab after importing the URL Profiler output. Page Type and URL Source are optional, but Action and Strategy are key elements of the process.

Our hypothetical client requires a Keyword Matrix. However, if your “scenario” does not involve keyword research (i.e. if it is a big site with content penalty risks) you can skip steps 5-7 and move straight to “Step 8 – Time to Analyze and Make Some Decisions”.

Step 5: Import GWT data

Match existing URLs from the content audit to keywords for which they already rank in Google Webmaster Tools

There may be a way to do this with URL Profiler. If so, I haven’t found it yet. Here is what we do to grab the landing page and associated keyword/query data from Google Webmaster Tools, which we then import into two tabs (GWT Top Queries and GWT Top Pages). These tabs are helpful when filling out the Keyword Matrix because they tell you which pages Google is already associating with each ranking keyword. This step can actually be skipped altogether for huge sites with major content problems because the “Focus” is going to be on pruning the site of low quality content, rather than doing any keyword research or content gap analysis.

Instructions for Importing Top Pages from GWT

Log into GWT from a Chrome browser

Go to Search Traffic —> Search Queries

Switch the view to “Top pages” (default is “Top queries”)

Change the date range to start as far back as possible (i.e. 3 months)

Expand the amount of rows to show to the maximum of 500 rows

This will put the s=500 parameter in the URL. Change s=500 to s=10000 or however many rows of data are available

See bottom of GWT page (e.g. 1-500 of ####).

In the Chrome menu go to View —> Developer —> Javascript Console

Copy and Paste the following script into the console window and press Enter.

This action should expand all of the drop-downs to show the keywords under each “page” URL and then open up a dialog window that will ask you to save a CSV file: (more info here and here).

You can check “Prevent this page from creating additional dialogs” to disable them.

Import the resulting download.csv file from GWT into the “GWT Top Pages” tab in the Content Auditing Dashboard.

Instructions for Importing Top Queries from GWT

Within GWT switch back to Top Queries.

Adjust the date to go back as far as you can.

Expand the amount of rows to show to the maximum of 500 rows

This will put the s=500 parameter in the URL. Change s=500 to s=10000 or however many rows of data are available

See bottom of GWT page (e.g. 1-500 of ####).

Select “Download this table” as a CSV file

Import the resulting TopSearchQueries.csv file from GWT into the “GWT Top Queries” tab in the Content Auditing Dashboard.

Step 6: Perform keyword research

This is another optional step, depending on the focus/objective of the audit. It is also highly customizable to your own KWR process. Use whatever methods you like for gathering the list of keywords (e.g. brainstorming, SEMRush, Google Trends, Uber Suggest, GWT, GA…). Ensure all “junk” and irrelevant keywords are removed from the list, and run the rest through a single tool that collects search volume and competition metrics. We use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which is outlined below.

Select “Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups”, paste in your list of keywords and click “Get search volume”.

Note: At this point you should have already expanded the list as much as you need/want to so you’re just gathering data and organizing them now.

Note: The copy/paste method is limited to 1,000 keywords. You can get up to 3,000 by uploading your simple .txt file.

Go to the “Keyword Ideas” tab on the next screen and Add All keywords to the plan.

Go to the “Ad Group Ideas” tab and choose to Add All of the ad groups to the plan.

Download the plan, as seen in the screenshot below.

Import the data into the AdWords Data tab of the Content Auditing Dashboard

Use the settings below when downloading the plan:

Step 7: Tying the keyword data together

Again, you don’t need to do this step if you’re working on a large site and the focus is on pruning out low quality content. The GWT Queries and KWR steps provide data needed to develop a “Keyword Matrix” (KWM), which isn’t necessary unless part of your focus is on-page optimization and copywriting of key pages. Sometimes you just need to get a client out of a penalty, or remove the danger of one. The KWM comes in handy for the important pages marked as “Improve” within the Content Audit tab just so the person writing the copy understands which keywords are important for that page. It’s SEO 101 and you can do it anyway you like using whatever tools you like.

Google Adwords has given you the keyword, search volume and competition. Google Webmaster Tools has given you the ranking page, average position, impressions, clicks and CTR for each keyword. Pull these together into a tab called “Keyword Research” using Vlookups. You should end up with something like this:

The purpose of these last few steps was to help with theKWM, an example of which is shown below:

Step 8: Time to analyze and make some decisions!

All of the data is right in front of you, and your path has been laid out using theContent Audit Scenarios tool. From here on the actual step-by-step process becomes much more open to interpretation and your own experience / intuition. Therefore, do not consider this a linear set of instructions meant to be carried out one after another. You may do some of them and not others. You may do them a little differently. That is all fine as long as you are working toward the goal of determining what to do, if anything, for each piece of content on the website.

Sort by Copyscape Risk Score

Which of these pages should be rewritten?

Rewrite key/important pages, such as categories, home page, top products

Rewrite pages with good Link and Social metrics

Rewrite pages with good traffic

After selecting “Improve” in the Action column, elaborate in the Strategy column:

No external links, no social shares, and very few or no entrances / visits

After selecting “Remove” from the Action column, elaborate in the Strategy column:

“Prune from site to remove duplicate content. This URL has no links or shares and very little traffic. We recommend allowing the URL to return 404 or 410 response code. Remove all internal links, including from the sitemap.

Which of these pages should be consolidated into others?

Presumably none, since the content is already externally duplicated

Which of these pages should be marked “Leave As-Is”

Important pages which have had their content stolen

In the Strategy column provide a link to the CopyScape report and instructions for filing a DMCA / Copyright complaint with Google.

Sort by Entrances or Visits (filtering out any that were already finished)

Which of these pages should be marked as “Improve”?

Pages with high visits / entrances but low conversion, time-on-site, pageviews per session…

Key pages that require improvement determined after a manual review of the page

Which of these pages should be marked as “Consolidate”?

When you have overlapping topics that don’t provide much unique value of their own, but could make a great resource when combined.

Mark the page in the set with the best metrics as “Improve” and in the Strategy column outline which pages are going to be consolidated into it. This is the canonical page.

Mark the pages that are to be consolidated into the canonical page as “Consolidate” and provide further instructions in the Strategy column, such as:

Use portions of this content to round out /canonicalpage/ and then 301 redirect this page into /canonicalpage/ Update all internal links.

Campaign-based or seasonal pages that could be consolidated into a single “Evergreen” landing page (e.g. Best Sellers of 2012 and Best Sellers of 2013 —> Best Sellers).

Which of these pages should be marked as “Remove”?

Pages with poor link, traffic and social metrics related to low-quality content that isn’t worth updating

Typically these will be allowed to 404/410.

Irrelevant content

The strategy will depend on link equity and traffic as to whether it gets redirected or simply removed.

Out-of-Date content that isn’t worth updating or consolidating

The strategy will depend on link equity and traffic as to whether it gets redirected or simply removed.

Which of these pages should be marked as “Leave As-Is”?

Pages with good traffic, conversions, time on site, etc… that also have good content.

These may or may not have any decent external links

Another Way of Thinking About It…

For big sites It is best to use a hatchet-approach as much as possible, and finish up with a scalpel in the end. Otherwise you’ll spend way too much time on the project, which eats into the ROI.

This is not a process that can be documented step-by-step. For the purpose of illustration, however, here are a few differentexamples of hatchet approaches and when to consider using them.

Parameter-based URLs that shouldn’t be indexed

Defer to the Technical Audit, if applicable. Otherwise, use your best judgement:

e.g. /?sort=color, &size=small

Assuming the Tech Audit didn’t suggest otherwise these pages could all be handled in one fell swoop. Below is an “example” action and an “example” strategy for such a page:

Action = Consolodate

Strategy = Rel canonical to the base page without the parameter

Internal search results

Defer to the Technical Audit if applicable. Otherwise, use your best judgement:

e.g. /search/keyword-phrase/

Assuming the Tech Audit didn’t suggest otherwise:

Action = Remove

Strategy = Apply a noindex meta tag. Once they are removed from the index, disallow /search/ in the robots.txt file.

Blog tag pages

Defer to the Technical Audit if applicable. Otherwise…:

e.g. /blog/tag/green-widgets/ , blog/tag/blue-widgets/ …

Assuming the Tech Audit didn’t suggest otherwise:

Action = Remove

Strategy = Apply a noindex meta tag. Once they are removed from the index, disallow /search/ in the robots.txt file.

eCommerce Product Pages with Manufacturer Descriptions

In cases where the “Page Type” is known (i.e. it’s in the URL or was provided in a CMS export) and Risk Score indicates duplication…

Strategy = Write 2-3 sentences of unique, useful content that explains choices, next steps or benefits to the visitor looking to choose a product from the category.

Out-of-Date Blog Posts, Articles and Other Landing Pages

In cases where the Title tag includes a date or…

In cases where the URL indicates the publishing date….

Action = Improve

Strategy = Update the post to make it more current if applicable. Otherwise, change Action to “Remove” and customize the Strategy based on links and traffic (i.e. 301 or 404)

Step 9: Content gap analysis and other value-adds

Although most of these could be put as optional items during the keyword research process, I prefer to save them until last because I never knows how much time I’ll have after taking care of more pressing issues.

Content gaps
If you’ve gone through the trouble of identifying keywords and the pages already ranking for them, it isn’t much of a step further to figure out which keywords could lead to ideas about how to fill content gaps.

At Inflow we like to use the “Awareness Ladder” developed by Ben Hunt, as featured in his bookConvert!. You can learn more about it here.

Content levels
If time permits, or the situation dictates, we may also add a column to the Keyword Matrix or Content Audit which identifies which level of content the page would need to compete in its keyword space. We typically choose from Basic, Standard and Premium. This goes a long way in helping the client allocate copywriting resources to work where they’re needed the most (i.e. best writers do the Premium content).

Landing page or keyword topic buckets
If time permits, or the situation dictates, we may provide topic bucketing for landing pages and/or keywords. More than once this has resulted in recommendations for adding to or changing existing taxonomy with great results. The most frequent example is in the “How To” or “Resources” space for any given niche.

Keyword relevancy scores
This is a good place to enlist the help of a client, especially in complicated niches with a lot of jargon. Sometimes the client can be working on this while the strategist is doing the content audit.

Step 10: Writing up the content audit strategy document

The Content Strategy, or whatever you decide to call it, should be delivered at the same time as the audit, and summarizes the findings, recommendations and next steps from the audit. It should start with an Executive Summary and then drill deeper into each section outlined therein.

Here is areal example of an executive summary from one of Inflow’s Content Audit Strategies:

As a result of our comprehensive content audit, we are recommending the following, which will be covered in more detail below:

Removal of about 624 pages from Google index by deletion or consolidation:

203 Pages were marked for Removal with a 404 error (no redirect needed)

110 Pages were marked for Removal with a 301 redirect to another page

311 Pages were marked for Consolidation of content into other pages

Followed by a redirect to the page into which they were consolidated

Rewriting or improving of 668 pages

605 Product Pages are to be rewritten due to use of manufacturer product descriptions (duplicate content), these being prioritized from first to last within the Content Audit.

63 “Other” pages to be rewritten due to low-quality or duplicate content.

Keeping 26 pages as-is with no rewriting or improvements needed unless the page exists in the Keyword Matrix, in which case it requires on-page optimization best practices be reviewed/applied.

These changes reflect an immediate need to “improve or remove” content in order to avoid an obvious content-based penalty from Google (e.g. Panda) due to thin, low-quality and duplicate content, especially concerning Representative and Dealers pages with some added risk from Style pages.

The Content Strategy should end with recommended next steps, including action items for the consultant and the client. Here is a real example from one of our documents:

We recommend the following actions in order of their urgency and/or potential ROI for the site:

Remove or consolidate all pages in the “Prune” tab of the Content Audit Dashboard

Detailed instructions for each page can be found in the “Strategy” column of the Prune tab

How to Conduct a Content Audit on Your Siteby Neil Patel of QuickSprout
Oh wait, I can’t in send everyone to a page that makes them navigate a gauntlet of pop-ups to see the content, and another one to leave. So nevermind…

Expanding the Horizons of eCommerce Content Strategyby Dan Kern of Inflow
Dan wrote an epic post recently about content strategies for eCommerce businesses, which includes several good examples of content on different types of pages targeted toward various stages in the buying cycle.

How to Perform a Content Marketing Audit by Temple Stark on Vertical Measures
Temple did a good job of spelling out the “how to” in terms of a high-level overview of his process to inventory content, assess its performance and make decisions on what to do next.

Why Traditional Content Audits Aren’t Enoughby Ahava Leibtag on Content Marketing Institute’s blogWhile not a step-by-step “How To” like this post, Ahava’s call for marketing analysts to approach these proejcts from both a quantitative (content inventory) and qualitative (content quality audit) resonated with me the first time I read it, and is partly responsible for how I’ve approached the process outlined above.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Don’t forget that this is just paid media advertising; it doesn’t include the many types of earned coverage like search, social, email, supermarket displays, direct mail and so on. Alongside the growth in media spends is a growth in the sheer volume of products available, which is made possible by increasingly sophisticated technologies for sales, inventory, delivery and so on.

What does this mean? Well, simply that the strategy of ‘just buy some ads and sell the benefits’ isn’t enough anymore: you’ll be lost in the noise. How can a brand retain customers and create loyalty in an atmosphere where everyone else has a better offer? Through tapping into the psychology of social relationships.

Imagine that you are at home for Thanksgiving, and your mother has pulled out all the stops to lovingly craft the most delicious, intricate dinner ever known to man. You and your family have enjoyed a wonderful afternoon of socializing and snacking on leftovers and watching football, and now it’s time to leave. As you hug your parents goodbye, you take out your wallet. “How much do I owe you for all the love and time you put into this wonderful afternoon?” you ask. “$100 for the food? here, have $50 more as a thank you for the great hospitality!” How would your mother respond to such an offer? I don’t know about your mother, but my mom would be deeply offended.

New scenario: You’ve gone to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the most delicious dinner you’ve ever had, the atmosphere is great with the football playing in the background, and best of all, your server is attentive, warm, and maternal. You feel right at home. At the end of the meal, you give her a hug and thank her for the delicious meal before leaving. She calls the cops and has you arrested for a dine-and-dash.

Social norms, as Ariely explains, “are wrapped up in our social nature and our need for community. They are usually warm and fuzzy. Instant paybacks are not required.” Examples would be: helping a friend move house, babysitting your grandchild, having your parents over for dinner. There is an implied reciprocity on some level but it is not instantaneous nor is it expected that the action will be repaid on a financial level. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with friends and family.

Market norms, on the other hand, are about the exchange of resources and in particular, money. Examples of this type of interaction would be any type of business transaction where goods or services are exchanged for money: wages, prices, rents, interest, and cost-and-benefit. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with businesses.

I’ve drawn you a very rough illustration – it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing visual, but it gets the point across:

Market norms come into play any time money enters into the equation, sometimes counter-intuitively! Ariely gives the example of a group of lawyers who were approached by the AARP and asked whether they would provide legal services to needy retirees at a drastically discounted rate of $30/hour. The lawyers said no. From a market norms perspective, the exchange didn’t make sense. Later the same lawyers were asked whether they would consider donating their time free of charge to needy retirees. The vast majority of the lawyers said yes. The difference is that, when no money changes hands, the exchange shifts from a poor-value market exchange to an altruistic and therefore high-value social exchange. It is a strange psychological quirk that ‘once market norms enter our considerations, the social norms depart.’

Mixed signals: when social and market norms collide

In a book calledPositioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout (originally published in 1981), the authors describe the 1950s as the ‘product era’ of advertising, when ‘advertising people focused their attention on product features and customer benefits.’ It was all about the unique selling proposition (USP).

In this case, the USP is mildness: “not one single case of throat irritation!” (image source)

However, as the sheer volume of products on the market increased, it became more difficult to sell a product simply by pointing out the benefits. As Ries and Trout put it, ‘Your “better mousetrap” was quickly followed by two more just like it. Both claiming to be better than the first one.’

They describe the next phase of advertising (which hit its peak in the 1960s and 70s and which we can probably all relate to if we watch Mad Men) as the ‘image era’, pioneered by David Ogilvy. In this period, successful campaigns sold the reputation, or ‘image’ of a brand and a product rather than its features. Ries and Trout quote Ogilvy as saying that ‘Every advertisement is a long-term investment in the image of a brand’. Examples include Hathaway shirts and Rolls-Royce.

Rather than the product benefits, this ad focuses on the ‘image’ of the man who smokes Viceroys: “Viceroy has a thinking man’s filter and a smoking man’s taste. (image source)

But yet again, as more and more brands imitate the strategy of these successful campaigns, the space gets more crowded and the consumer becomes more jaded and these techniques become less effective.

According to Ries and Trout, this brought the world of advertising into the ‘positioning era’ of the 80s, which is where they positioned (hehe) themselves. As they described this, “To succeed in our overcommunicated society, a company must create a position in the prospect’s mind, a position that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.”

This one’s all about positioning Winston’s in opposition to competitors: as the brand with real taste, as opposed to other brands which ‘promise taste’ but fail to deliver. (image source)

And yet, despite this evolution of advertising strategy over the course of the 20th century, all of these different approaches are ultimately based on market norms. The ‘product era’ sells you features and benefits in exchange for money; the ‘image era’ sells you on an image and a lifestyle in exchange for money, and the ‘positioning era’ sells you on why a particular company is the right one to supply your needs in exchange for money.

Social norms and loyalty

When does cheap not win? When it comes to social norms. Social norms are about relationships, community and loyalty. If your sister is getting married, you don’t do a cost benefit analysis to decide whether or not you should go to her wedding or whether the food will be better and the travel cheaper if you go to your next door neighbor’s BBQ instead. If anything, it’s the opposite: some people take it to such an extreme that they will go into massive debt to attend friends’ weddings and bring lavish gifts. That is certainly not a decision based on monetary considerations.

Therefore, if the average brand wants to get out of the vicious cycle of undercutting competitors in order to gain business, they need to start focusing on relationships and community building instead of ‘SUPER CHEAP BEST LOW LOW PRICES!!®’ and sneaky upsells at the point of sale. This is something my colleagueTim Allen spoke about in a presentation called “Make Me Love Your Brand, Not Just Tolerate It”. And this is what a large number of recent ‘advertising success stories’ are based on and it’s the whole premise behind many of the more recent trends in marketing: email marketing, personalization, SMS marketing, good social media marketing, and so on.

Some of the most popular brands are the ones which are able to find the perfect balance between:

a friendly, warm relationship with customers and potential customers, which also often includes a fun, personal tone of voice (the ‘brand personality’) – in these interactions there is often an offering of something to the customer without an expectation of instant payback, and

a strong product which they offer at a good price with good ‘market’ benefits like free returns and so on.

One example of this is John Lewis, who have good customer service policies around returns etc but also offer free perks to their shoppers, like the maternity room where breastfeeding mothers can relax. One of my colleagues mentioned that, as a new mother, his girlfriend always prefers to shop at John Lewis over other competitor stores for that very reason. Now if this is purely a convenience factor for her, and after her child is older she stops shopping at John Lewis in favor of a cheaper option, you could argue that this is less of a social interaction and more market influenced (in some sense it serves as a service differentiator between JL and their customers). However, if after she no longer requires the service, she continues to shop there because she wants to reciprocate their past support of her as a breastfeeding mother, that pushes it more firmly into the realm of the social.

Another thing John Lewis do for their fans is the annual Christmas ad, which (much like the Coca-Cola Santa truck in the UK) has become something which people look forward to each year because it’s a heartwarming little story more than just an ad for a home and garden store. Their 2012 ad was my favorite (and a lot of other people’s too, with over 4.5 million Youtube views).

But usually anytime a brand ‘do something nice’ for no immediate monetary benefit, it counts as a ‘social’ interaction – a classic example isSainsbury’s response to the little girl who wrote to them about ‘tiger bread’.

Some of my other favorite examples of social norm interactions by brands are:

Red Bull Wings, which is an initiative from Red Bull where they monitor Twitter for mentions of things like #allnighter and #midterms and then send the tweeters a care package with free Red Bull to help get them through the night

The catch is, you have to be careful and keep the ‘mix’ of social and market norms consistent.

Ariely uses the example of a bank when describing the danger of bringing social norms into a business relationship:

“What happens if a customer’s check bounces? If the relationship is based on market norms, the bank charges a fee, and the customer shakes it off. Business is business. While the fee is annoying, it’s nonetheless acceptable. In a social relationship, however, a hefty late fee–rather than a friendly call from the manager or an automatic fee waiver–is not only a relationship-killer; it’s a stab in the back. Consumers will take personal offense. They’ll leave the bank angry and spend hours complaining to their friends about this awful bank.”

Richard Fergie also summed this issue up nicely in this G+ post about the recent outrage over Facebook manipulating users’ emotions; in this case, the back-stab effect was due to the fact that the implicit agreement between the users and the company about what was being ‘sold’ and therefore ‘valued’ in the exchange changed without warning.

The basic rule of thumb is that whether you choose to emphasize market norms or social norms, you can’t arbitrarily change the rules.

A side note about social media and brands: Act like a normal person

In a time whenthe average American aged 18-64 spends 2-3 hours a day on social media, it is only logical that we would start to see brands and the advertising industry follow suit. But if this is your only strategy for building relationships and interacting with your customers socially, it’s not good enough. Instead, in this new ‘relationship era’ of advertising (as I’ve just pretentiously dubbed it, in true Ries-and-Trout fashion), the brands who will successfully merge market and social norms in their advertising will be the brands which are able to develop the sort of reciprocal relationships that we see with our friends and family. I wrote a post over on the Distilled blog about what social media marketers can learn from weddings. That was just one example, but the TL;DR is: as a brand, you still need to use social media the way that normal people do. Otherwise you risk becoming a Condescending Corporate Brand on Facebook. On Twitter too.

Social norms and authenticity: Why you actually do need to care

Another way in which brands tap into social norms are through their brand values. My colleagueHannah Smith talked about this in her post on The Future of Marketing. Moz themselves are a great example of a brand with strong values: for them it’s TAGFEE. Hannah also gives the examples of Innocent Drinks (sustainability), Patagonia (environmentalism) and Nike (whose strapline ‘Find Your Greatness’ is about their brand values of everyone being able to ‘achieve their own defining moment of greatness’).

Havas Media have been doing some interesting work around trying to ‘measure’ brand sentiment with something call the‘Meaningful Brands Index’ (MBi), based on how much a brand is perceived as making a meaningful difference in people’s lives, both for personal wellbeing and collective wellbeing. Whether or not you like their approach, they have some interesting stats: apparently only 20% of brands worldwide are seen to ‘meaningfully positively impact peoples’ lives’, but the brands that rank high on the MBi also tend to outperform other brands significantly (120%).

Now there may be a ‘correlation vs causation’ argument here, and I don’t have space to explore it. But regardless of whether you like the MBi as a metric or not, countless case studies demonstrate that it’s valuable for a brand to have strong brand values.

There are two basic rules of thumb when it comes to choosing brand values:

1) It has to be relevant to what you do. If a bingo site is running an environmentalism campaign, it might seem a bit weird and it won’t resonate well with your audience. You also need to watch out for accidental irony. For example, McDonalds and Coca-Cola came in for some flak when they sponsored the Olympics, due to their reputation as purveyors of unhealthy food/drink products.

Nike’s #FindYourGreatness campaign, on the other hand, is a great example of how to tie in your values with your product. Another example is one of our clients at Distilled, SimplyBusiness, a business insurance company whose brand values include being ‘the small business champion’. This has informed their content strategy, leading them to develop in-depth resources for small businesses, and it has served them very well.

2) It can’t be so closely connected to what you do that it comes across as self-serving. For example, NatWest’s NatYes campaign claims to be about enabling people to become homeowners, but ultimately (in no small part thanks to the scary legal compliance small print about foreclosure) the authenticity of the message is undermined.

Key takeaways

So what can we take away from these basic principles of social norms and market norms? If you want to build a brand based on social relationships, here’s 3 things to remember.

1)Your brand needs to provide something besides just a low price. In order to have a social relationship with your customers, your brand needs a personality, a tone of voice, and you need to do nice things for your customers without the expectation of immediate payback.

2)You need to keep your mix of social and market norms consistent at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Don’t pull the rug out from under your loyal fans by hitting them with surprise costs after they checkout or other tricks. And don’t give new customers significantly better benefits. What you gain in the short term you will lose in the long term resentment they will feel about having been fooled. Instead, treat them with transparency and fairness and be responsive to customer service issues.

3)You need brand values that make sense for your brand and that you (personally and as a company) really believe in. Don’t have values that don’t relate to your core business. Don’t have values which are obviously self-serving. Don’t be accidentally ironic like McDonalds.

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Have you seen examples of brands building customer relationships based on social norms? Did it work? Do you do this type of relationship-building for your brand?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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